Top Business Intelligence and Analytics Stories of 2010

Business intelligence and analytics have remained hot even as the rest of the economy has cooled, as corporate data mining remains a critical priority.

Business intelligence and analytics have become something of a corporate obsession in recent years, as the severe economic downturn of 2007-2009 forced companies to look for cheaper ways to maximize their competitive advantage and do as much as they could with limited resources. BI, analytics and data mining were at the top of that list; companies were already collecting massive amounts of data, so why not explore it to see what obvious opportunities they were missing?

Business intelligence and analytics are becoming an important part of all enterprise applications  witness Oracle's (NASDAQ: ORCL) ambitious plans to add BI to all its applications and IBM's (NYSE: IBM) massive investment in analytics.

Not surprisingly, BI and analytics articles were some of the most-read topics on eCRM Guide this year, as there are few richer sources of data than customer relationship management (CRM) systems. These were the most-read business intelligence articles on eCRM Guide this year:

Based on the response to this story, developers aren't the only ones interested in the potential of the R language to change business intelligence and analytics. One of the most-read stories on eCRM Guide this year.

Oracle had a number of business intelligence announcements this year, including the release of BI 11g, but it was the company's ambitious plans to add business intelligence to all its apps that garnered the most reader interest.